(In this SmartBits, Sudhir Patnaik outlines “Expectations of Senior Management“. The video is at the end of this blog)
Leadership is key. But more than organization and people leadership owning a substantial part of work is also needed. One can have an oversight on some part of the organization, but need to get hands dirty by owning areas that have no managers. This keeps one grounded and also helps develop empathy for their organization as to what they go through. Here are the expectations : (1) The ability to understand what the team is going through. (2) Show up in incidents, show up in incident reviews, show up in customer escalations (3) Keep learning newer technologies and catch up with what’s going on in the industry (4) Have the curiosity to look at everything from a metrics driven approach.
( In this SmartBits, Zulfikar Deen outlines “ Management expectations of CIO & IT team “. The video is at the end of this blog)
Whether the end-user
organization is small or large, the challenges remain the same for both of
them. For a large multinational multi-billioncorporation, or a smaller
organization challenges are very similar. They could be related to security,
adoption, consumer understanding, delivery, timeline or quality.
The difficulty for a
smaller organization is that IT team is much smaller, not an army of people.
They do not have a huge budget to ensure the same challenges are tackled
better. With small and shoestring budgets, it is difficult to bring in newer
technology and solutions into operations. Not having an appropriate budget is
an important challenge, but that doesn’t mean that they will be left far
behind. They still have to adapt, invent and have to move at the same speed.
The next challenge
is that business leaders come across sound bites (for example Blockchain) from
meetings they attend and are keen to implement. Our role is to ensure they
distill it correctly and make sure they are used appropriately in context to
the business, in relation to the readiness of the systems and ensure they don’t
fall too far behind.
Another aspect to be
looked at, is the level of board and the top management CXO organization’s ability to look at
technology. Often, CXO’s would neither be a risk-taking forerunner nor they
want to lag behind. We need to understand what level of comfort the management
has and then we need to play along with that. One needs to watch for a
technology shaping up and as soon as it is ready for usage in the system they
should start putting it in place.
